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Buying and selling cars doesn’t have to be such an intimidating experience. All that negotiation, hesitation, and feeling of being ripped off can now be a thing of the past in Austin.
Beepi, a Bay area startup, launched in Austin this week to reinvent the pre owned car buying and selling process.
“We try to make the process simple, easy and even fun,” Co-founder Owen Savir said. “Fun isn’t a word you usually hear when you’re buying a car.”
And the process really is simple. Head to beepi.com and input some brief information about your car. You’ll be a quoted price immediately, which is guaranteed to be higher than any other dealer by at least $1,000. If you accept the price, a Beepi inspector will come to your home or office to do a full 185-point inspection that takes about two hours and includes a test drive and a full inside and outside inspection. For comparison, Savir noted that BMW and Mercedes only do around a 150 point inspection for their pre owned vehicles. Beepi standards are so high, only two-thirds of cars on average qualify.
Beepi also takes all necessary photos for selling during the inspection. Then, Beepi puts your listing online and guarantees the car will be sold within 30 days. Even if it doesn’t sell in those 30 days, Beepi will buy the car from you at the same guaranteed price. Their sophisticated algorithm looks at lots of data that allows them to undercut the market and give customers the best price possible.
Beepi takes an up to 9% cut from each sale. That’s pretty low compared to a typical dealer cut of 30-50%.
On the flip side, if you’re a buyer, you can head to Beepi.com to purchase a car. You’ll get access to the inspection reports and can even contact the inspectors with questions. Once you’ve found your dream car, you can pay in almost anyway possible — including Bitcoin. Then, the thoroughly detailed car will show up at your doorstep with a big bow and even a few surprises (which Savir would not disclose). Finally, you get 10 days to test the car to make sure you absolutely love it. If you don’t, Beepi will come take it back for a full refund. And if that’s not enough, if anything goes wrong in the first three months to 10 years (depending on the make and model of the car), Beepi will come and fix it. Even if it’s something as little as you running out of washer fluid.
Founders Savir and Ale Resnik met and created their product in California in 2013 after having similarly awful experiences with a pre owned vehicle bought from a car dealer. The company officially launched in 2014 and has been rapidly growing ever since. Savir said they have a $150M revenue run rate this year.
While they plan for launching more markets, Beepi takes great pride in their company culture. All employees are shareholders in the company and get extensive training at Beepi headquarters before they begin. They also hire a lot of veterans — Savir himself is a veteran and he says they’re the kind of people that want to give back, which is exactly what they look for.
Beepi currently has over 113 employees, with over 80 at their Los Altos headquarters.
“We’re really excited to be in Austin. We want to better the lives of car buyers and sellers,” Savir said. “We’re a brand new way of doing things. That’s Beepi.”
Beepi is also available in California, Phoenix, and Dallas. They have raised a total of $79 million in 4 funding rounds from about 20 investors and plan to expand nationwide by the end of 2016.
“Perseverance and persistence are key ingredients to succeeding,” Savir said. “Everyone told us that this would never work, but we believed it would, and we wanted to prove everyone wrong and we did.”
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